The Thick Weeds Of California

Weeds are now so thick in the State of California that many spots that were formerly wild flower gardens have now become nothing but weed patches. A great many of these mischief makers came to this country as stowaways, and began life in the new country where ballast from sailing ships had been dumped; some came in baled goods; some in packing material. That is why those sections of the country that were colonized by early settlers make such good hunting grounds for the tracker-down of escapes. Not only weeds grow in such regions, but flowers as well, for home-sick women somehow find a way of smuggling in coveted flowers from former over country or overseas gardens.

Although the women and their homes have now gone, the flowers and potherbs still bloom beside the rotting fence posts and among the crumbling bricks. Renegade plants are thick in Virginia, as they are in the coastal towns of the Northwest. Garden strays wander far and wide over the Mother Lode country in the mining districts of the Californian Sierra foothills. Ghost towns on the deserts are short on plant runaways because it is in comparatively recent years that plants from desert-like regions have been introduced into America, but in the mountains, where there is rain, every deserted home has its rose bush. Year after year, in out of the way places in the Sierra, I have watched forage plants take the place of wild flowers as trails are lengthened and pack animals enter areas that were formerly inaccessible.

Seeds have endless ways of getting around, and some of them are admirably fitted for being blown or carried from place to place. The sticky ones and the ones with spikes resort to hitchhiking, traveling in the fur of animals. An army of shrubs from a distance springs up along hedgerows and fences from which birds have dropped seed. Trees appear beside rocks where jays have buried their leftover supply, having brought the nuts there to crack. Down the sides of one river in Humboldt County foxglove seeds have drifted and landed to become a part of wild flower assemblages along the water's edge. Composites are ardent truants. Lumped together they compose a sizable number of the hundreds of exotic escapes in America.

I have seen the slopes around old farmhouses covered with the yellow of annual chrysanthemum. Coreopsis tinetoria, that all brown-and-yellow annual, is a native of eastern and central States, and the improved forms make grand standbys in our summer borders. It has recently taken up its abode in Trinity County, California. English daisies now nestle among the trilliums and clintonias of the coastal redwood region, and oxeye daisy, a native of northern Asia, blanketer of soil-sad acres in eastern States, has become a troublesome weed in Oregon and Washington, and is at home in the fields and hedges of northern California.

By: davidbunch

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